Where In the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

Morgan Spurlock is following up Super Size Me, his McDonald's-bashing first-person documentary, with Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?, Andrea Chalupa reports from the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

When Spurlock found out his wife was pregnant, he grappled with all the anxieties of a first-time father. He wondered what kind of world he was bringing his child into and decided to make it a safer place by tackling Public Enemy No. 1: Osama Bin Laden.

In the film, after getting all the necessary inoculations and undergoing military training to learn how to dodge a grenade and spot the direction of sniper fire, he takes a crash course in Arabic. Among the phrases he strives to learn: "Don't take me, take the cameraman."

Spurlock then embarks on his mission, leaving his wife for the entire nine months of her pregnancy. He starts in Egypt, talking to university students about the significance of Osama Bin Laden then moves onto Israel, meeting Palestinians who insist that Bin Laden uses their struggle as a public relations tool to further his own cause.

Spurlock bounces around the Middle East&emdash;Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—where he is regularly welcomed into the homes of ordinary people who all seem to like Americans but not the American government. One man in Morocco explains how every day he prays for God's wrath to strike America, but is quick to add that he hopes Spurlock isn't there when it happens.

One thing that Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? doesn't do (other than find Bin Laden) is draw a line in the political sand. While untangling details of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Spurlock maintains his sense of humor, using short cartoon skits to provide historical context.

He's not as polarizing as Michael Moore and keeps things funny as he injects jokes into interviews with anti-American imams or gets caught in a lynch mob of Hasidic Jews going after his camera after a failed attempt at man on the street interviews.

For Spurlock's regular-guy-like quality, his amusing use of video game animation, his unemotional approach to complicated problems, this film will play well in Middle America, especially among young men who voted for Bush the first and second time around.

While young people who keep up on Noam Chomsky might find Spurlock's simplistic explanation of the historical and political contexts of 9/11 old news and obvious, the film does provide a service. Its digestibility and entertainment value and could bridge the political and cultural divide that was at a boiling point during the last presidential election, when Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 premiered.

Overall, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? is an entertaining film that brushes up on important facts in recent history, ends in an inevitable optimistic message by this soon-to-be-dad, and humanizes an entire region of the world that, like the U.S., is caught in the crosshairs.

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